Chapter - 13

"Dr Faustus"

- Christopher Marlowe

Question- Write a note on Life and Works of Marlowe.

Answer -

Life and Works of Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe was the greatest English dramatist before Shakespeare. His father was a shoe maker of Canterbury. Christopher took a degree at Cambridge University apparently not because of any high attainments as a scholar but because of a government order which suggests that he had been serving at court. For a time he was a member of the Earl of Nottingham's players. He wrote poems and plays and translated beautifully from the classics. And then, just before he was thirty, he was killed by a dagger thrust in a Deptford tavern. Whether Ingram Frisar, who killed him, was quarreling with the poet over a drinking score or was acting as a secret agent for the government, research has not yet discovered. But kit Marlowe, born the same year as William Shakespeare, completed his work and his life when his great contemporary was Writing his first plays.

If Marlowe had never written a play, his name would stand high among those of the English poets. There is a lyrical simplicity in his pastoral The Passionate Shepherd to His Cove that gave the poem a place in England's Helicon (1600) and a romantic quality that drew Raleigh to write the realistic Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd. His translation of Ovid's Amores was published at 1599, and his narrative poem, Hero and left unfinished at his death, was completed by George Chapman, in 1598. but Marlowe's greatest metrical contribution is the mighly line. Of this dramatic blank verse. He took  the stiff iambic pentameter of earlien playes and made of I a flexible, varied unrestrained and powerful vehicle for his tragedies. And the tragedies are worthy of the poetry. They are essentially classical in their presentation of a single meighly hero who rises to a great height and crashes to a terrible fall. Marlow's aim was always lofty. He condemned the Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits, and such conceits as clownage keeps in pay. Only his Fanstus contains farcical scenes and for these he may not have been responsible. Titanic heroes, filled with the lust for power-these are his chief characters, not clowns, servants or even woman. And the plots, too, are on an epic scale, with the actions thrown against sweeping backgrounds.

Marlowe's first tragedy, 'the Tow-Part Tamburlane (1587-88) presents as shepherd warrior of Scythia who drives emperors and king's before his unconquerable sword until hi is himself conquered by death. In The Jew of Malta (c. 1584-90) the hero is a jew moved to atrocious acts of insane cruelty by the injustices that Christians have heaped upon him. Young Mortimer of the historical tragedy of Edward II (1591-93) rises to political heights until he has touched the very button on fortune's cap and can scorn the order for his execution. But the most famous of Marlowe's plays in The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1588-92). Marlowe took the plot from a Geman Chapbook account of a scholar-magician who sold his soul to the devil for twenty-four years of power. In all Marlowe's tragedies, with the possible exception of The Jew of Malta, the sheer strength of the dramatist and the lyrical quality of the poet save the play from inflation and rant. Exaggerated as characters and episodes frequently are, Marlowe's power keeps them from seeming unnatural and banal. Marlow's contribution to drama was that he raised the subject matter of drama to a higher level. He gave life and reality to his characters. He modified the conception of tragedy. He imparted passion. Vehemence and force to drama. Marlowe added poetic grandeur and poetic excellence to drama. He breathed into the drama the life spirit of poetry, in place of rhyming lines he introduced and perfected the blank verse. His verse is notable for its burning energy, its splendour of diction, its sensual richness, its variety of pace, and its responsiveness to the demands of the demands of varying emotions. His blank verse is unequalled by any of his contemporaries except Shakespeare.

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